Although not directed primarily at law schools, the innovative suggestions in Forget MOOCs–Let’s Use MOOA could easily be used to save most US law schools a very large chunk of change. Perhaps this should be in our next strategic plan?
(Spotted via Naked Capitalism.)
Given the source — AbovetheLaw.com — I would have been prepared to dismiss it out of hand. But Brian Leiter, who is a very discerning consumer of rankings, says that that the “ATL Top 50” is “not nuts and contains some useful information”. Coming from him, that is fairly high praise.
U.Miami Law comes in at 49th on the list — considerably higher than our usual US News rank, and right near the middle of the range (41-55) I would put us at if I were Ratings Czar. And Yale is #1, so they got that right too.
Apologies, blog readers, but this announcement is for UM Law 1L & 2L students only:
I would like to hire a part-time summer research assistant. The hours are negotiable, but likely would be in the 15-20 hours per week range. It would be best if you could start very soon after exams finish. Current UM 1Ls and 2Ls are welcome to apply.
My research assistant will help me with my summer writing projects. The job requires someone who can write clearly, is well-organized, and who is really good at finding things in libraries and on the Internet. There may be some bluebooking involved too. (If you happen to have some web or programming skills (some or all of HTML, MySQL, Perl, Debian), that could be useful, but it is not in any way a requirement.)
The hourly pay of $ 13 is set by the university, and is not as high as you deserve, but the work is sometimes interesting.
If you are interested, please send me an e-mail with the words RESEARCH ASSISTANT (in all caps) followed by your name in the subject line. In the email tell me:
– how many hours you’d ideally like to work per week and what other jobs/courses you have planned for the summer (if any),
– when you are free to start, and whether you have vacation plans (no problem if you are planning to take a week or two off during the summer)
– your phone number and email address.
– whether it is OK for me to share your application with other interested faculty members who might also want a summer research assistant.
– whether, if things work out, you might be interested in continuing on at 10/hrs week during the next academic year.
Please attach the following to your email:
1. A copy of your resume (c.v.),
2. A short writing sample (non-legal is preferred — in any case, please do NOT send your LCOMM memo),
3. A transcript (need not be an official copy).
(You might also mention that you saw the ad here. Can’t hurt.)
Please note that this job is different from the Jotwell summer editor position.
Every couple of years David Bernstein writes a blog post I agree with:
the best time to buy real estate, or really any investment, is when “everyone” is saying it’s a terrible investment. …
If we’re not as this stage with regard to demand for law school, we are damn close, with applications running about half the level of six years ago. Law school certainly isn’t for everyone, and how worthwhile economically it might be for anyone in particular has to start with that individual’s opportunity cost and where he gets admitted…
But there hasn’t been a better time to apply to law school in a long time, if ever. Worried about going into debt? Go to a law school school somewhat below where your credentials would allow, and they will shower you with aid… Always dreamed of going to a top 10 law school? You may never have less competition than now. Want to keep your current job and go part-time, but got rejected a few years from the only law school in town with a part-time program? This year, they will probably take you.
Whether law school makes sense for you still depends enormously on what you want to do in the long run, and what your alternatives are. Even if this is the ‘new normal’ for applicant numbers — and I’ll bet that numbers will rebound substantially from this trough within five years even if they don’t go back to old peaks — it’s clear that for now law schools as a class are only making partial adjustments to the new state of things, part of which involves competing aggressively by offering scholarship money and/or lower admissions standards. Thus it’s a buyer’s market from the potential student’s point of view.
[Occasionally I resurrect a draft blog post that somehow never made it to publication when I first wrote it. This is one of them.]
C.E. Petit, he of Scrivner's Error, pens (?) a rant about the poor state of legal writing amidst law graduates:
Yet another set of law school deans wrings its collective hands over law schools' failure to teach writing skills sufficient for lawyers to survive in practice. The problem is that it really is the deans' fault…
Among his targets, Mr. Petit would blame the judiciary, for writing so poorly, and the legal academy for inflicting generations of judicial butchery of the English language upon the poor unsuspecting 1Ls, 2Ls, and 3Ls.
While admitting there is a legal writing problem, as a law professor engaged, so it seems, in corrupting the keyboards of the young, I would like to plead justification (necessity).
Mr. Petit proffers a solution to the bad-legal-writing problem:
Perhaps most important of all, the deans need to trash virtually every casebook currently in use. The biggest problem with legal writing is that law students see mostly examples of bad (or worse) legal writing in the bulk of their classwork, particularly in the common law courses. In Contracts, students study Sherwood v. Walker exhaustively, and still can't figure out what the holding is because the judge couldn't bloody write (even by nineteenth century standards in Michigan); in Property, even the casebooks try (ineptly, with one exception) to make head or tail of the actual ruling in Shelley's Case; in Torts, the string of double negatives (which can be helpful rhetorical devices when used sparingly, but not in a string) in the leading cases on product/strict liability causes more confusion than anything in the discussion over comparative/contributory negligence; and in Criminal Law, just try reading M'Naghten's Case. More casebooks need to follow the path that Professor LaFave did in Criminal Procedure: Clear, concise summaries, supplemented by extended quotations where helpful… and that California's Justice Mosk did in establishing the concept of comparative negligence by writing more simply and more clearly than did the advocates of the contributory negligence system.
I think this is mostly wrong. There is real value in teaching from real cases, without potted summaries, even (especially?) the badly written ones. This is the reality of law practice: Judges often write badly. (I have said this for years: see my Legal Writing Tips.) Lawyers need to know how to decipher bad judicial prose. Meaning-extraction (or even and especially meaning-creation) is an important legal skill we work hard to impart to our students. How will they learn whether to appeal a badly written case except by struggling with its ancestors?
In addition, students need to know the big cases. Even if they are badly written, that doesn't detract from the leading cases' importance. A student who knows her way around the original has an advantage over someone who just learned from a summary.
I agree that it is hard to first show students precedents — some eloquent and many ham-handed — tell them the cases matter, sometimes matter a great deal, and then in the next breath ask students not to write as badly as those very judges whose torturous prose we've force-fed them, but those are the cards lawyers are dealt. Those cases are real. They have authority. They must be confronted and dissected, even if that carries risk of their being emulated.
[Original draft, Sept. 2010]
I’ve been reading draft student papers. One extremely common locution goes like this: “If a person does [something] then their liability will be [whatever].” That “their” is there because students don’t want to say “his” or “her” nor use the clunky “his or her”. English doesn’t currently offer a neuter word; “their” is a plural when the grammar requires a singular, but to my students’ ear that is less of an issue than picking a single gender to refer to both.
Why exactly they don’t pluralize the whole thing (“If people do [whatever] then their liability will be [whatever]”) I don’t know.
This language shift suggests that at some time in the future the non-prescriptivist definition of “their” will shift to include a role a neuter singular possessive. But I don’t believe we are there yet on “their” so I’m marking “their” up whenever I find it misused.
Then again, I may be behind the times: Dictionary.com already offers “their” a secondary singular meaning:
2. (used after an indefinite singular antecedent in place of the definite masculine form his or the definite feminine form her): Someone left their book on the table. Did everyone bring their lunch?
Jotwell Blenderlaw